Data flow and validation in workflow modelling

A complete workflow specification requires careful integration of many different process characteristics. Decisions must be made as to the definitions of individual activities, their scope, the order of execution that maintains the overall business process logic, the rules governing the discipline of work list scheduling to performers, identification of time constraints and more. The goal of this paper is to address an important issue in workflows modelling and specification, which is data flow, its modelling, specification and validation. Researchers have neglected this dimension of process analysis for some time, mainly focussing on structural considerations with limited verification checks. In this paper, we identify and justify the importance of data modelling in overall workflows specification and verification. We illustrate and define several potential data flow problems that, if not detected prior to workflow deployment may prevent the process from correct execution, execute process on inconsistent data or even lead to process suspension. A discussion on essential requirements of the workflow data model in order to support data validation is also given..

Ontology-Based Workflow Design for the Coordination of Homecare Interventions

Part 20: Health and Care Networks

Towards a Workflow Management Approach for Health Monitoring of Bridges

Part 14: Interoperability and Integration

Layered workflow scheduling algorithm

Workflow applications require workflow processing in which workflow tasks are processed based on their dependencies. With the emergency of complex distributed systems such as grids and clouds, efficient workflow scheduling (WFS) algorithms have become the core components of the workflow management systems (WfMS). Thus, WFS that allocates each task in the workflow to a relevant resource with the aim of improving system performance and end user satisfaction is fundamentally important. In this paper, we propose a new workflow scheduling algorithm called Layered Workflow Scheduling Algorithm (LWFS) for scheduling workflow applications. We studied the efficacy of the LWFS scheduling experimentally and compared its performance with approaches including Improved Critical Path using Descendant Prediction (ICPDP), Highest Level First with Estimated Time (HLFET), Modified Critical Path (MCP) and Earliest Time First (ETF). The results of the experiments show that the proposed approach outperforms other approaches.

Workflow temporal verification for monitoring parallel business processes

Workflow temporal verification is conducted to guarantee on-time completion, which is one of the most important QoS (Quality of Service) dimensions for business processes running in the cloud. However, as today's business systems often need to handle a large number of concurrent customer requests, conventional response-time based process monitoring strategies conducted in a one-by-one fashion cannot be applied efficiently to a large batch of parallel processes because of significant time overhead. Similar situations may also exist in software companies where multiple software projects are carried out at the same time by software developers. To address such a problem, based on a novel runtime throughput consistency model, this paper proposes a QoS-aware throughput based checkpoint selection strategy, which can dynamically select a small number of checkpoints along the system timeline to facilitate the temporal verification of throughput constraints and achieve the target on-time completion rate. Experimental results demonstrate that our strategy can achieve the best efficiency and effectiveness compared with the state-of-the-art as and other representative response-time based checkpoint selection strategies.

On the zeros of the Abelian integrals for a class of Liénard systems

A planar polynomial differential system has a finite number of limit cycles. However, finding the upper bound of the number of limit cycles is an open problem for the general nonlinear dynamical systems. In this paper, we investigated a class of Liénard systems of the form x'=y, y'=f(x)+y g(x) with deg f=5 and deg g=4. We proved that the related elliptic integrals of the Liénard systems have at most three zeros including multiple zeros, which implies that the number of limit cycles bifurcated from the periodic orbits of the unperturbed system is less than or equal to 3.